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The secret life of women spies

By Naomi CarniolSpecial to the Star

Sun., Nov. 9, 2008

January 1945. 8 a.m. Raining. More than 4,000 kilometres from her Ottawa home, 19-year-old Sally Carling sits at a desk in a Victoria, B.C., radio station. Like the 10 women in uniform beside her, she wears a headset, listening intently for coded Japanese messages.

Almost all the staff, recalls Carling, now 82, were members of the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service. It was hardly glamorous work. They worked in shifts. Some transcribed, some decoded, some decided which messages were significant.

This week, a new exhibition will pay tribute to the many women like Carling who worked in radio communications in North America and Europe during World War II. Toronto artist Nina Levitt's Relay will open shortly after Remembrance Day at Oshawa's Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

While the exploits of male fighter pilots is celebrated in movies and monuments, the work of women involved in wartime radio communications has been largely forgotten. "All this information is in archives, buried somewhere, but it's not in the public realm," Levitt says. "It's not in our consciousness."

Yet in Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New York, Washington and especially London, England, women were involved in transcribing and translating coded messages. In Ottawa, for example, women worked in the Examination Unit, which tried to break enemy codes, says intelligence expert and University of Toronto history professor Wesley Wark.

It was thought that women's focused attention spans made them better suited than men to the tedious work, says Levitt, who teaches at York University's Department of Visual Arts.York University political science and women's studies professor Sandra Whitworth chalks up the collective amnesia to societal ideas about appropriate behaviour for men and women.

"We tend to really only see the things that fit those assumptions," Whitworth says. Women's wartime involvement in radio communications didn't, at least according to societal ideals of femininity.

University of Windsor history professor Christina Burr wonders if the forgetfulness is due to "a post-war shift in popular culture where we went back to notions of trying to redefine what was so-called normalcy and traditional family life."

Burr also suggests women's involvement in radio communications, as well as other intelligence activities, may have been overlooked partly because of the secrecy of the work. Carling's commanding officer, for instance, instructed her never to speak about it.

Relay hauls women's involvement in radio communications out of the shadows. (Two of Levitt's earlier installations, Little Breeze and Thin Air, explored women's intelligence activities during World War II. Relay completes the trilogy.) The impetus is "historical revision," says the artist, who spent last week installing the show at the gallery. It opens on Saturday and runs through Jan. 4. A symposium related to the exhibit takes place there Nov. 29.

RELAY Doesn't change the facts. It does, however, make them strikingly visible. For openers, a 10-metre-tall steel radio tower stands in the gallery's foyer, nearly grazing the ceiling. Beyond that, Relay takes place in two rooms. The first features a huge photograph of a radio that envelops those near it, "much like the women would have felt when they were sitting at those machines for hours," says the gallery's curator, Linda Jansma.

The space also houses a Quonset hut, a type of temporary building often found on airfields. Inside the hut, a black-and-white film plays silently. The recruiting film, created for the Women's Royal Naval Service, shows women transcribing coded radio messages.

Scattered outside the hut are eight vintage suitcases. These seemingly prosaic artifacts have a compelling significance: When women spies parachuted into France, they each carried two suitcases – one with clothing and another with a radio transmitter.

When a visitor picks one up, the suitcase emits a recording of a message in Morse code. It also sends a visual waveform of the message to the screen in the hut. If all eight are lifted at once, eight swerving lines bisect the recruiting film, and high-pitched sounds and static fill the room, giving the visitor a taste of what women listening to coded messages heard. The second room features three imposing steel radio towers that seem even taller than their four metres. Together, they're a monument to the women who spent hours listening to coded messages over the airwaves.

While the show pays tribute to women engaged in radio communications, it also honours Canada's role in the flow of information during World War II.

In the early 1940s, the British established a training camp for spies just outside Oshawa. Camp X taught mainly British and American intelligence agents. It's rumoured that Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, trained there.

Less well known is that Camp X housed a radio-relay station, called Hydra. Any messages sent from London to New York, Washington or South America (and vice versa) came through Hydra. These coded messages, says Levitt, often contained intelligence reports.

Some women, such as Evelyn Davis, worked in Camp X's communications centre. Davis joined the camp when she was 21. Like most of the women there, Davis, now 85, was a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps. It's not clear if any were directly involved with Hydra. ("It was reported that there was one female radio operator, but I haven't found a trace of her," says Levitt.)

The title of Levitt's show is a reference to Hydra's role in relaying information all over the world from a single point.

Relay's radio towers reflect this activity. When a visitor in the first room picks up a suitcase, she unknowingly transmits a message in Morse code to the second room. One by one, the radio towers light up as if relaying the message, which is then translated and scrolled across a screen over pictures of women involved in wartime communications work.

For the McLaughlin Gallery, Relay is a chance to explore less-known regional history such as the existence of the radio relay station. "Being able to contextualize it within contemporary art just makes it that much more fascinating," Jansma says.

Setting up the exhibit so that visitors in the first room don't know that they're sending messages to the second room, Levitt says, mimics the blindness of radio communications – women who listened to coded messages, such as the teenaged Sally Carling, often didn't understand the content of those messages.

Others, including the British female spies who parachuted into France – one British source states that of the 470 secret agents England sent to occupied France, at least 39 were women – didn't even know if the messages they sent were ever received, says Levitt.

In addition, the Morse code messages transmitted from one room to another in Relay are biographies of female spies. Lift one suitcase in the first room and words scroll across a screen in a second room telling the viewer about Andrée Borrel, one of the first two women agents to parachute into France.

Relay invites viewers not only to remember female spies and the many women involved in radio communications during the war, it also encourages them to think about the stereotypes that caused these women's contributions to fade from memory.

The latter theme connects the show to other pieces created by Levitt in her 20 years of working in photography, installation and video. "All of my work is about re-presenting and trying to analyze stereotypes of women in our culture," she says.

Whitworth, who edits the International Feminist Journal of Politics, suggests that as activists and artists revisit the past, they'll illuminate the many ways in which women were doing things that countered societal expectations of gender. In the process, she notes, they'll show that "those norms are not as fixed as we, in the broader sense, may like to think they are."

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